On
May 19, 2003:Eric
Lundquist, Editor-in-Chief of eWeek, recognized that IBM's On-Demand
Computing, HP's Adaptive Enterprise, and Sun's N1 are all movements
towards Computing Fabrics as we first predicted them in 1998.

On
January 7, 2002:
eWeek called our 1998 Computing Fabrics Cover Story "Prescient"
and declared The Grid, a subset of Computing Fabrics, "The Next
Big Thing".

On
May 19, 2003, Eric Lundquist's Opinion column in eWeek discussed
the growing move to Utility Computing in all its various incarnations.

He recognized that IBM's On-Demand Computing, HP's Adaptive
Enterprise, and Sun's N1 are all movements towards Computing
Fabrics as we first predicted them in 1998.

Eric
said:

"While
lacking a claim to first usage, we as a publication (then
PC Week) carried an article
on computing fabrics in 1998. That article was written
by Erick and Linda von Schweber, who called themselves the
Infomaniacs and were well-remembered at Comdex's Spencer
Katt parties for their glittering robes and out-there predictions.
When I talked to them earlier this month at their new digs
in San Francisco, they were still well-grounded in fabrics,
grids and the utility computing business."

"While
the fabrics are still being woven, in Infomaniac speak,
the days when utility computing will be easy and safe are
still about a year and a half away. That's not too far for
planning purposes, but it's still not reality, either. According
to Erick von Schweber, the payoff in utility computing will
be when functionalities can be combined while the methodologies
to build those functions remain constant."

"And
if you want to take an even longer view of the next big thing,
Rob Fixmer, in this week's InteractiveWeek section, dives into
the promise of grid computing and finds there really was something
to what the Infomaniacs were telling our readers when they championed
computing fabrics back in 1998."

"In
the Fall of 1998, Erick and Linda Von Schweber, founders of
the Infomaniacs think tank, published an article in eWeek
predicting the evolution of "a new wave in computing—one that
we believe promises within the next five years to deliver almost
limitless cheap computing power and to change the balance of power
among technology vendors."

"They
called their idea "computing fabrics" and described it as
"a new architecture" that would "erase the distinctions between
network and computer" by linking "thousands of processors and
storage devices into a single system."

"Today,
only three years into their five-year time frame, the concept
is called "grid computing," and, increasingly, it's hailed as
the Next Big Thing. Fabric? Grid? The only difference is the density
of the weave.